The Flourishing Creator

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What Will We Do at Our Summer Camp + My First “Press Trip” Retreats?

This week, we’re opening up registration for a brand-new retreat specifically requested by our readers.

During our Coaching Program Summer Camp last year, we had such a wonderful, inspiring, and rejuvenating time simply being travel writers together, doing our own thing but in the company of others with similar goals, experiences, and issues to debate over meals and wine tastings, that our readers wanted us to expand it, so we’ve created a new retreat to do just that.

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A Brand New Way to Understand What It’s Really Like to Be on a Press Trip and If It’s for You


We asked, you answered, and we listened!

We’re launching a brand-new retreat format this summer that is 100% focused on being out, in the field, exploring a destination with ample guidance so that you can see if the life of a travel writer is for you and learn how to up your game in terms of how you travel vs. how a professional travel writer travels.

We’re modeling this event after our awesome but intense week-long bootcamp and our summer camp for coaching students, which focused entirely on tours and other pitch-idea-gathering outings laced with impromptu lessons on whatever most piqued the interest of the group, covering a wide range of topics like:

  • the theory and practice of food photography, including trends over time and how to develop your own style
  • how to get the most information out of reticent interview subjects
  • what to do when a source basically invites you to meet their family, gives your a parting gift, spells out their name and important dates in great detail, and then tells you that you can’t write about any of it
  • how to turn chance encounters with interesting people well-known in their fields into articles in subject areas you don’t know well
  • how to get the information you need for your piece when there are customers vying for your sources attention
  • what to take from your mountain of notes and information into an actual pitch or piece
    and much more!

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New Year, New Books, New Prizes for You :)

Isabel Allende, as a rule, begins all of her books on January 8.

“Originally, it was out of discipline; now it’s to organize my life,” she told a gathering of writers at the Book Passage book store in California in the summer of 2015. “I need the space and the silence.”

As an author of 22 books, which, though primarily works of fiction, typically feature a heavy sense of travel in space and often time that affords her a close relationship with travel authors, Allende has clearly devised a method that works.

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What is the Travel Writing Summer Camp? Why Should You Care? And How Can You Join?

The very short answer to “what is the Coaching Program Summer Camp” is that it is probably similar to what you wish your life could look like all the time:

  • the morning hours (until around 2 p.m.) are completely unscheduled so you can focus on getting your most important work done in your choice of ideal work space: a library stocked with magazines and inspiring books, desk set against floor to ceiling windows looking out at the mountains, or a chair in the sun in the garden
  • breakfast is ready whenever you are, including house-made yogurt, jams, and freshly baked sourdough bread
  • lunch is picked from the garden right before you eat it, whether for a salad of heirloom greens with just-plucked spring onions, chives, and herbs or a sandwich with just-made bread, house-made pesto from greens grown on site, and tomatoes that came off the vine one minute before being sliced
  • (whenever it works for you) meals, morning workouts, and afternoon research outings can be shared with other committed travel writers excited to discuss everything from trips to troublesome editor relationships with you
  • each afternoon includes the option to visit a winery, distillery, brewery, historic site, state park, museum, artist’s workshop, or whatever you-name-it-and-it’s-an-option-on-the-schedule activity you can think of to practice your interviewing or article idea generation or to bone up on a subject area that you might be interesting in writing about but currently don’t feel an expert in
  • weekends are spent exploring new destinations after the requisite highly Instagrammable brunch on a mountain top

And yes, if you’re interested, there’s also croquet, bocce ball, frisbee, ping pong, bonfires, outdoor movies, and whatever other lawn sport or arts and crafts or summer activity screams summer camp to you.

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12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 12: A Baker’s Dozen of Classes to Learn How to Write Every Kind of Travel Article Out There

Today’s holiday trivia: “Nollaig na mBan” or “Women’s Little Christmas” is a tradition celebrated by women across Ireland on January 6. Hearkening back to the days when large families were the norm and men weren’t expected to help around the home, Women’s Little Christmas represented the one day each year when women would finally get a break. To this day, men take over the housework on January 6, while women hold parties or go out to celebrate the day with their friends, sisters, mothers, and aunts.

Beginning in January of 2018 and continuing throughout much of the year, we embarked on a multi-month webinar series with a very special goal in mind: to provide university-style writing training in how to write each of the different types of articles you may be tasked with as a professional travel writer.

We walked through a part of the writing process–structuring your articles–that should come before your fingers hit the keyboard and before you even begin researching your piece to show you how to quit second-guessing yourself and save tremendous time on your articles.

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12 Days of Holiday Specials Day 11: Choose Your Own Travel Writing Adventure With a Customized Set of 11 Webinars

Today’s holiday trivia: In many European countries, the celebration of Christmas on December 25 pales in comparison with January 6’s Feast of the Epiphany–also know as the visit of the three wise men or magi. Presents for children arrive on the eve of the Epiphany rather than Christmas Eve, though they are not delivered by a jolly man. In Italy, gifts are ferried about by La Befana, a witch with a long nose and speedy broomstick who leaves garlic and onions, in addition to the usual coal, for bad children or parents who haven’t left her a glass of wine.

When we asked what you wanted in this year’s holiday specials, there was a ton of interest in our webinars, particularly around:

  • journalistic detail
  • setting up sponsored trips
  • getting a book published

So, we’ve run discounts exclusive to our 12 days of holiday specials on all three. But…

Since all of you are in a different places with your travel writing, we know there are things that you might need that another might be past or not be ready for yet, so we didn’t want to make our specials entirely a popularity contest, and came up with a way for you to put together your own, person, customized webinar discount set.

We’ve also slashed 75% off the price you would normally pay to get all of these webinars in our library, where each comes in a set with:

  • streamable high-def video
  • smaller downloadable video
  • streamable and downloadable audio file
  • full transcript available to read on screen or as PDF download
  • all webinar slides in PDF form
  • any applicable worksheets

To take advantage of this offer and grab any 11 of your choosing webinars just $56–nearly 75 percent off the normal pricing–head to the webinar library, and load up your cart with the webinars listed above and enter the code chooseyourown.

Not sure what is right for you? Here are some suggestions based on what you want to focus on this year.

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